Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping
Wikipedia asked AI companies for attribution and to use Wikimedia Enterprise, then tightened its limits. What changed and the proper routes to the data.
Elena Petrova · November 3, 2026 When an AI Agent Hits a Bot Wall: The Access Problem Nobody Designed For
AI agents act for a person but arrive like a bot, and sites were not built for that. What happens at the wall, why a 200 is the risk, and how to build for it.
Chris Collins · November 3, 2026 Best OSINT Tools by Category (Domain, Social, Image, Breach)
The OSINT tools investigators rely on, grouped by job: domains and infrastructure, social media, images and video, breach data, records and archiving. Plus what each tool reveals about you.
Sofia Marin · November 2, 2026 How to Set Up a Proxy on Windows & macOS (Step-by-Step)
Set up a proxy on Windows 11 and macOS step by step: system settings, the command line, bypass lists, which apps follow the setting, and how to turn it off.
Matt Brown · November 2, 2026 The Pay-Per-Crawl Web: What Crawler Tolls Do to the Cost of Data
Sites can now charge crawlers per request. How pay per crawl, HTTP 402 and RSL licensing work, what tolls add to a crawl's cost, and how to budget for them.
Sofia Marin · November 1, 2026 Passive Threat Intelligence: Collecting Without Touching the Target
How to gather threat intelligence on a domain without sending it a packet: certificate logs, RDAP, archives and passive DNS, with tested Python and the limits.
Chris Collins · November 1, 2026 CTV Ad Verification: Challenges & How to Check Streaming Ads by Region
Why connected TV ads are harder to verify than display ads, which checks matter, and a step-by-step way to see which streaming ads actually play in each region using residential IPs.
Priya Nair · October 31, 2026 Most Scraped Websites in 2026: A 30-Day Web Scraping Snapshot
Which websites get scraped the most in 2026? We pulled 30 days of public usage data for 8,186 ready-made scrapers and 239.8 million runs, then ranked the targets by demand and run success.
Elena Petrova · October 31, 2026